Within the acting profession Paul Scofield was often referred to as “St Paul”. In part it was the appearance, always distinguished but in late middle age almost demanding veneration, with the brow and cheeks deeply lined. Scofield’s features at times had the look of a statue pitted by the wind and the rain. The weather-beaten face was a reflection of the long walks he was in the habit of taking across the downs near his Sussex home and around his Scottish summer retreat on the Isle of Mull.

Scofield was the reverse of the roistering British actors who were rarely out of the gossip columns for much of the 1950s and 1960s, the period when he was ensuring his own lasting reputation. He had no time for green-room chatter or thespian carousing. True to character he was a member of the Athenaeum rather than the Garrick. When work was done he made straight for his house in the country near Haywards Heath, which he had bought in 1953, and the company of his wife Joy, whom he had married almost ten years before that.

The nickname derived also from the large stage roles in which he excelled. These were often men who lived most of their lives towering above the rest of humanity but being finally brought down to earth in pieces. Of these roles his King Lear under Peter Brook’s direction at Stratford and at the Aldwych in 1962-63 is reckoned the supreme embodiment of his abilities in tragedy, and the greatest performance of that role of his era.

Perhaps more famous for the general public was his Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, played both in the theatre (1960) and on screen (1966), where his performance won him an Oscar. On stage there was a succession of Shakespeare’s captains and kings; lower down the social order but higher up the spiritual one came the whisky-priest in the adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, one of the parts which had cemented Scofield’s West End reputation in the 1950s. And finally, when he was well into his seventies, came the title role of John Gabriel Borkman in Ibsen’s tragedy at the National in 1996.

Beyond the physical presence there was the voice, an instrument that was totally unmistakable. It contained gravel and gravitas in equal measure, with each word meticulously articulated. When the Ghost spoke in Zeffirelli’s 1991 film of Hamlet it could only be Scofield, a famous Hamlet himself (under Brook’s direction) almost 40 years previously. On stage Scofield watched the audience intently to make sure that every syllable was registering.

Scofield was, on his own admission, simply an actor, preferably in London and preferably in the theatre. He made a number of films, some best forgotten and others approaching the class of A Man for All Seasons. There were television appearances, including a double as the Chuzzlewit brothers in the BBC’s Martin Chuzzlewit adaptation, and especially in later years quite a lot of radio work. But the theatre remained Scofield’s true home.

He had no desire, unlike so many of his colleagues, to become a director, nor despite an unrivalled number of major roles with the subsidised companies did he show any interest in administration or power. He served on boards for both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, but resigned from both. He saw himself solely as an interpreter of the words and thoughts of others and the results of this determination were the supreme vindication of it.

David Paul Scofield was born at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, and grew up in the county, where his father was headmaster of a primary school. He might have drawn on childhood memories when he played the academic, Mark van Doren, in Robert Redford’s film Quiz Show (1995), one his most successful cameo screen appearances.

At Varndean School for Boys, in Brighton, he played Juliet and Rosalind, but showed no interest in further education and left in his mid-teens. Brighton was close to home and with it the Theatre Royal, regular venue for pre-West End tours. Scofield used to turn up on Sunday nights when extras were being hired for walk-on parts in the week’s run about to start.

At l7 he went to the Croydon Repertory Theatre School and then to the London Mask Theatre School, run by John Fernald, who was later to take over RADA.

A foot disability precluded Scofield’s doing military service and during the Second World War he was an itinerant actor-student, learning what he could from whom he could. He did a turn with ENSA, but his first serious experience came with Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre, at the time one of the most productive cradles of British acting. It certainly had a powerful influence on Scofield. It was there he met both his future wife, Joy Parker, and the stage director who was to guide many of his key performances over the next 20 years, Peter Brook.

Together in Birmingham the two men caused a theatrical stir with one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays, King John, Scofield appearing as the Bastard. In 1946 they went on to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, then also running under Sir Barry Jackson’s aegis, and scored another double success with what was then, at any rate, another unpopular piece, Love’s Labours Lost. Scofield’s good looks and a bravura Henry V brought in the first of many Hollywood offers, which he was wise enough to reject. Had he not done so the Brook-Scofield partnership might never have flourished.